An Open Letter to WoTC, Greg Leeds, Simon Blackwell and Jerome Lalin

I LOVE Dungeons & Dragons. This game has been responsible for so much of the way that I was shaped as a teenager. I was a sad, lonely teen, suffering from a life of abuse at the hands of alcoholic stepfather when I discovered D&D. This game introduced me to people who would become lifelong friends, kept me off of the streets, and gave me something to channel my powerful imagination into.

D&D has had such a profound effect on my life and my work as a performer, that I actually wrote a 10 minute monologue about how D&D saved my life. Here’s a video of me performing this monologue at Portland Story Theater’s Urban Tellers show.

Yesterday you launched the playtest of DND Next. Well, rather, you tried to do so. I received an email at 6:00 AM saying it was ready. It’s now 24 hours later, and servers are still crashing. This makes me incredibly sad.

Don’t get me wrong. My professional career spans performing and technology startups. I get that technical issues happen.

Unfortunately, and it kills me to say this, today was just another incident that demonstrates Wizards of the Coast’s (ahem) poor handling of D&D’s transition into the Internet/Web2.0/Social age. Just a few other examples:

Technology

This has been my biggest pet peeve. When D&D 4e was being created, there was a lot of buzz around online tools. Things like storing your character sheet online, having all of the books and resources at your fingertips, and taking the old Dungeon Magazine and Dragon Magazine digital were all met with controversy, but a lot of people also liked these ideas, myself included. Since Wizards was such a big company with so many resources, I was expecting a pretty slick offering. Instead, what we got was .Net and Silverlight apps.

The Character Builder was originally an interesting desktop app that could be hacked on a little bit, and some gamers were doing some interesting things, but it was really clunky and the first iteration was just so frustrating it was practically unusable. Then, to add insult to injury, Wizards (being so concerned about copyright infringement) took the Character Builder away from everyone’s desktop and made it online only. Built on Microsoft’s Silverlight, it’s a closed system that doesn’t integrate with anything and constantly crashes. There’s an extensive known issue list, and Microsoft looks they’re going to stop supporting it themselves!

Oh, and the virtual tabletop – where’s the virtual tabletop? This has been discussed for YEARS! Some guys with some spare time and a moderately successful Kickstarter project kicked your butt. Hard. I know there’s a Beta of the tabletop – but seriously, years? Don’t take this the wrong way Simon Blackwell, but your background in Banking industry technology is perhaps not the right fit for a contemporary gaming company that needs to operate on the open Web.

Think about it – your customer base has a huge number of highly skilled computer programmers and software engineers. Imagine what you could do if you were able to harness that enthusiasm on Open Source projects!

Oh, and what is up with letting some guy named Steven Hawley sit on the @Hasbro Twitter handle? There’s no excuse for that. Not your problem, I imagine. But somebody should ask the marketing folks at Hasbro.

The Rise of Pathfinder/Paizo

Arguably, Pathfinder is outselling D&D. If you read the message boards and the gamer forums, you’ll see that there is a lot of positive sentiment for Paizo and negative sentiment for WoTC. The Geeks are pissed at the constant revisions to the game. Pissed at not being listened to. Pissed that D&D is being turned into something a lot more like World of Warcraft and a lot less imaginative.

Paizo is taking advantage of this sentiment, and capitalizing on it. Go look for a game here in Portland. There are more open Pathfinder games than D&D 4e, and that doesn’t take into account the other games like Vampire or GURPs.

Paizo Online’s MMO is going to hurt you, Wizards. It’s going to wound D&D, perhaps mortally. Look at the enthusiasm for their Kickstarter project. At the time of this writing, there were 1,548 backers.

The lesson that you should have learned from the Open Gaming License is perhaps not that the eco-system cut into your profits, but that your team doesn’t know how to nurture an open system. You should look to WordPress, Java, and any number of additional technology communities to see how to grow an Open Source community around your product and make gobs of money from it.

The loss of Geek Culture.

Wizards owns a bunch of other games besides D&D. You own Duel Master, Kaijudo, a line of novels, and oh, yeah Magic: The Gathering. Each of these games grew out of a subculture that created the game based on their own sense of fun and make-believe. When these games were small, the people running the companies were the ones who created the games. They were the geeks. Now Wizards is full of executives with backgrounds in banking, consumer goods, and publishing. I don’t know why he left, but this culture shift might be why Ryan Dancey is gone. He’s certainly doing well at Paizo/Goblinworks.

Look at Paizo’s executive team. They’re DEEP in gaming history. I imagine the folks who run D&D at Wizards are as well, but do they have the latitude to create a culture and community that gamers will be enthusiastic about? It doesn’t look like it, from where I’m sitting.

I’ve been one to exercise restraint in my criticism of Wizards. I’m exceedingly loyal to D&D. The problem is that I can’t see where Wizards’ current course gets me excited. The previews of DND Next have been…underwhelming. After I finally accessed the play test docs, I was disappointed to see something that looks very much like you tried to go back to D&D 3e, with enough tweaks to remove the OGL. If the next stage of D&D is full of more technology mis-steps and corporatization of my beloved game, I might actually switch to another system myself – which would be a shame.

Do you guys play D&D? Do you play any of the games that Wizards makes?

Casual Gamer

All of this said, I’m a casual gamer. I play once a month usually, sometimes twice. There’s probably some nuance somewhere that I’ve missed. I only occasionally visit the message boards or blogs at Wizards.com, and I’ve never attended a convention – but from the limited perspective of a gamer/digital marketer/performer, this is what I’m seeing.

Please feel free to reach out to me directly. I’m happy to discuss my thoughts over the phone or in person – this seemed like a better way to be heard than your contact page. Or don’t. You’re busy guys, and this might just be one more point of feedback.

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24 Responses to An Open Letter to WoTC, Greg Leeds, Simon Blackwell and Jerome Lalin

vermillionnMay 25, 2012

Well said. Everything you wrote is more or less on the nose. If WOTC doesnt do something soon, I really dont think the D&D IP will survive much longer.

AlexTKeaneMay 25, 2012

I can see why they’d take a step back to a 3.5 or earlier system. When 4e came out, the big thing that was taking gamers from D&D was the new computer games, and so they designed 4e with that in mind and a huge focus on combat. At present you have Paizo and Pathfinder as the big rival, and so they decide to go in that direction, with at-will cantrips added to the Vancian magic system and class abilities and such added to the standard 3.5 ruleset. That said, as a tabletop ruleset, I actually enjoy the look of the Playtest so far, though I’ll have to see how it plays out in actually play.

I do fully agree with you that Wizards needs to embrace the electronic frontier though. A move that I think would make them more money in book sales, and provide gamers with something we’d like better, would be to get rid of DDI as it currently exists and implement as you put above an online character sheet that is stored online. A good example of this is Obsidian Portal, which allows you to create characters on an online forum type thing and provides some nice tools for GMs to run campaigns. I will add that Paizo doesn’t really have that much more on Wizards when it comes to online game support, and in a lot of ways has less. While yes, Paizo does provide PDF copies of books (something a lot of D&D players want immensely) and an online character sheet system for players in the Pathfinder Society organized play, they don’t have so much as a beta of virtual tabletop. That’s not so much to call out Paizo so much as say that Wizards isn’t really as far behind the rest of the publishers as we all often make them out to be.

But look at Goblinworks. They’ve got the right team lined up, they’re doing a Kickstarter project which creates the proof of concept ($100k and counting), and they are acting nimble. The promise is there, where Wizards lumbers along using outdated technology.

I’d also love to see mobile apps for the rulesets. This would work much better than pdfs with tablets/smartphones, don’t you think?

AggraxMay 25, 2012

Not to be Mr. Nitpick, but Wizards has never owned Yu-Gi-Oh and has not owned Pokemon for several years. I understand the point your trying to make, but the incorrect facts undermine your credibility.

@CoryHuff Going along with this thought, to me the question isn’t really how Wizards is behind in online gaming, because they aren’t. The real question is why are they not even remotely ahead in any way?

I can go and pull out my four year old 4th Edition rulebooks and see the advertisements in the back for the virtual tabletop they were touting as part of DDI. The fact that their online tools are still a horrific jumbled mess at this point (and still lacking a virtual tabletop last I checked) just says to me that they have botched this badly.

AlexTKeaneMay 25, 2012

@CoryHuff As to mobile apps, I actually agree. And there is an app (unofficial I believe) called spells which has all the Pathfinder stuff on it.

I’m a big fan of Paizo and Pathfinder, and so I was really excited to see that Wizards had taken a page from that book to do “3.5+” in terms of how things work. To me at least, 3.5/Pathfinder had a much more player-friendly character sheet than did 4e. The only characters who had to worry about copying minutiae out of a book were your spellcasters, or those whose feats allowed them to do special stuff.

As an aside, what do you think of the class kits that each get their own special ability within the overarcing theme of the base class?

@AlexTKeane The idea of Kits has been around since 2nd edition. It’s one thing that works, though I find it clunky. I like skill and ability based character development. I think if Wizards really wanted to change up the mechanics, they could go in that direction.

But…it’s not really the core mechanics that I quibble about. It’s the digital environment that D&D is transitioning into. I want to see this succeed – but I don’t see it happening right now.

vermillionnMay 28, 2012

@CoryHuff I actually like the idea of going digital, but I think they have done it half ass and badly. More and more people I know have e readers now and arnt buying books. I recently became one of them, but the issue is gaming books on PDF read TERRIBLY on e readers. The content simply is not ideal for that format. There are rumors White Wolf is experimenting with going to “Gaming as a Service” where you pay a low monthly cost for access to everything, similar to D&D insider in a way, except the experience has been made ideal for ereaders and laptops, so digesting and discovering content is not stuck to a design that frankly is becoming out dated. I realize there is lots of nostalgia around having your table covered with some PHBS and MM’s and other assorted books, but frankly if everyone at the table with their 1 e reader can effectively replace that (and the multitudes of character sheets and other documents) then I dont see that as a bad thing. At least, I cannot see how that detracts from the experience.Wizards I think is just doing it wrong. I think if they did it more intelligently from the get go, it would have succeeded, but they are moving slowly, releasing buggy or poorly designed products, etc etc. They are stuck to the idea of print, which is as a medium something I do not see having a great future long term. Who buys cd’s anymore or entire albums online?

VicenteCartasMay 28, 2012

It interesting to hear you complain about .NET, while endorsing the Pathfinder MMO, which is basically vaporware right now (and will be for a few years), and even more, when they seem to have decided on using HeroEngine as their middleware solution, a middleware that is quite outdated.

@VicenteCartas What I’m really trying to get at is not so much that Paizo’s MMO is great. I’m trying to say that Paizo has gone the route of building it with the community in mind and raising enthusiasm from the ground up. Wizards is taking the approach of building a product without bringing the community along.Sure, there’s the message boards, but I think many would agree that Wizards’ track record on digital products lately doesn’t seem to match what the community expectations are.

VicenteCartasMay 28, 2012

@CoryHuff I am going to disagree somewhat that they are building it with the community (I can agree they are building it with part of the community). They are asking money to their community so they can build a demo they can show to possible investors to get the real money to build the game. If they get invested, they are going to have to answer to investors first, not to the community (and more after the recent 38 Studios disaster).

This Kickstarter also makes one to ask himself why they couldn’t provide that money themselves (Paizo can’t invest 100k-200k in this demo?). And if they wanted to show investors “hey look, a lot of people is interested!” (which 1500-2000 people is not enough by far when talking about MMOs), they could have added a $1 option to their KS, or Paizo surely has internal numbers for subscribers to their APs, general sales, and their store usage that they can show around to gather attention.

Also, not taking into account the somewhat strange Kickstarter campaign, the game is designed to be a fantasy version of Eve Online, with Eve Online mechanics for skill training,… That is what the community asked? Or that’s what they seem to have known in the past? (given that some of them worked at CCP).

Wizards may have done a lot of mistakes with their digital offerings, yet Paizo is not up to a great start either. Their first real project is the most complicated and expensive type of game that exists, and not only that, they are not going for a sandbox MMO, or for a normal MMO, they are doing a crossover of both styles, something no one has pulled off before.

vermillionnMay 28, 2012

@VicenteCartas @CoryHuff
Having poked around the Paizo forums, I think the concept of their MMO is more or less registered very well with their player base. Players did not want a World of Warcraft rip off, they wanted a game in which they (the players) could make their own stories and live in an organic world. The EVE sandbox like model does that super well. Its a reason its currently the only MMO in history to grow every year of its existence without fail and why it has such a passionate fan base. The skill system there also allows for diversity instead of rushing ‘levels’ to do end game ‘stuff’. Players are the game in a EVE like sandbox, and I think that would hit home with anyone that sat around a table telling stories in which THEY were the ones to change the course of politics in the region, attack an evil prince whom had taxed his subjects into poverty, etc etc. Thats not saying they will succeed or do well, but the idea is very enticing. I can imagine ‘finding’ a cave and discovering it is filled with vile evils instead of having quest npcs take me there, and then discovering after fighting an evil dragon within it with friends that there was a mithral vein, and finding a friend whom is handy with a smithing hammer to refine that into some gear that we will share and sell the excess on the auction houses, etc etc. Once we clear out that cave..its empty..gone (similar to a worm hole in eve). There is no “lets grind Ragnaros till my phat epics drop”. In fact we might run into another adventuring company deep in the cave that also wants our prizes and they might choose to team up with us..or attack us. Right there a life long alliance or rivalry may spring up, similar to table top but not represented outside of sandbox environments…

VicenteCartasMay 28, 2012

@vermillionn @CoryHuff Their own description in Kickstarter says the game is a mix between Eve and WoW:

“Pathfinder Online is a hybrid sandbox/theme park-style MMO”

I have followed also this topic quite carefully, and more than one and two people wanted a game more similar in spirit to DDO than Eve (play adventures in Golarion instead of the Eve sandbox). I wonder if a Baldur’s Gate-like RPG would have resonated more or less than Eve (I would have preferred that for sure, no clue about the rest of the world ).Also, Eve has not grown every year, as before Crucible they had a loss of subscribers as they tried going mainstream too much (ambulation, captain quarters, items store,…). They corrected their path fast and returned to their hardcore roots quite fast though.

In the end, it is very hard to extrapolate from Eve to Pathfinder MMO, as things have changed a lot since Eve Online was released, the fantasy scene is much more crowded than the sci-fi scene, a world with characters is more expensive artistically to maintain than a world of space ships (less animations, it’s easier to maintain models without looking too bad to the competition, space is emptier than Golarion,…).

vermillionnMay 28, 2012

@VicenteCartas @CoryHuff Having a game in the spirit of DDO is just DDO 2. Reproducing the wheel is not innovating, and having a true sandbox style fantasy game is fresh in the sea. If they want their product to be a hit outside the core audience it has to be different, and having played eve for 5 years and played dnd since 2nd ed, I really think a sandbox environment better captures the atmosphere than a ‘repeat the same quest 500 times’ enviroment does.
Also to correct something, Eve, despite the losses in Crucible, still boasts an increase year to year. This is tracked based off Fiscal Year, not at any point in time. While they lost lots of subscribers during the Monocle incident, last I saw from their Eve Fest their total subs are up over this time last year. I’ll try to dig up the numbers later, but hardly super relevant since the only large losses they have ever had in their history is by going mainstream and departing from their sandbox roots, which somewhat helps solidify a good case for Pathfinder Online being a sandbox itself.

VicenteCartasMay 28, 2012

Having Fantasy Eve is not very original either, which doesn’t matter much, as originality and innovation aren’t so important for games (sadly).
Also, I have played Eve for seven years and RPGs for a while, and Eve does not evoke any type of RPG atmosphere like Baldurs Gate or Fallout do. Repeating a quest 20 times is not very fun, but mining for 10 hours to fuel a POS is not very interesting either. Spending four hours to find an interesting fight is not very fun either, nor is taking part in a 0.0 lag-fest with 1000 people trying to shoot with their screens frozen.
IMHO, the main RPG experience Eve may evoke is something similar to Birthright, in the end-game alliances politics area, but very few people ever experience that.
Eve subscription numbers, while positive yearly as you say, are small for MMORPGs, and they are small simply because most people don’t like games like Eve. Eve is simply too hard and too harsh. Even CCP, with all their experience and goodwill, are having a very hard time reaching other types of MMO players and growing their game faster (and not losing their own players in the process).

vermillionnMay 29, 2012

@VicenteCartas You are making some arguments here that I’m not sure are fair. You are citing key gameplay styles of EVE when all I have said that the sandbox is a better environment for a fantasy game. I’m not sure what being a sandbox has to do with mission running (repeat the same 7 missions in XYZ space) or mining a field near a POS. Those are clearly “EVE” things. Are you saying because EVE is a sandbox and because EVE is built in a very unfriendly matter with lots of grind that Pathfinder would also be effected as such? I’m not sure I have read any posts saying Pathfinder Online will emulate Eve in any way, only that its also a Sandbox. And while I agree the idea of a sandbox is hardly original, it is however very rare, which may be why you are making key gameplay comparisons between them which I do not think have any weight. Pathfinder has a different dev team, target audience and setting, so the chances it will model day to day activities the way EVE did is not very likely.

VicenteCartasMay 29, 2012

@vermillionn We can keep talking about Eve and sandbox games, but I think this strays quite a lot from the original topic, that was the merits and flaws of Wizards and Paizo digital offerings and work, which was the only think I wanted really to point in my first comment

Hi Cory. Did you know how much of a D&D junkie I am? Did you know I’m an old tabletop, paper and dice-type gamer? Even worse – did you know I’m still playing the same game (now 4th Edition) (the tabletop way) that has lasted 15 years? Now you know. XD Oh yeah, and hey. D&D saved my life too – I started playing in college, played through depression, met all my friends and my now-husband this way…..my life would not be the same without gaming.

So, yeah.

Oh and Pathfinder is completely awesome because of the Gnomes character class. Mind you, I have simple needs…